On Mon, Oct 4, 2010 at 4:40 AM, Hannes Magnusson <hannes.magnus...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Actually, when adding a use contributor note the note becomes > 'property of the PHP Documentation Group' > > See http://no.php.net/manual/add-note.php > "This means that any note submitted here becomes the property of the > PHP Documentation Group and will be available under the same license > as the documentation."
Ah, that's good to know! > We did recently changed the manual license to CC-BY, and I must admit > I didn't consider the consequences that had on the code snippets. > > I'm also unsure how we can fix that. Add a note "all code examples are > BSD licensed" clause somewhere? There's a DFSG (draft) FAQ that provides some good insight on the topic: ---- http://people.debian.org/~bap/dfsg-faq.html#docs Q: I'm writing documentation to accompany a free program. What license should I use for this documentation? A: We strongly suggest you use the same license as used for the program. Then it will be possible to take code and put it into the documentation, and vice versa. If you would like to grant some extra freedoms for the documentation not granted for the remainder of the software package (eg freedom to distribute as a paper manual without corresponding document source) we recommend you use a dual license: one of which grants these extra freedoms, and the other the same license as the program. ---- Given that the PHP License isn't compatible with the GPL, then yes, I think choosing a permissive license like the New BSD License is an appropriate choice. It shouldn't take too long to fix this -- I'd just add a note in the documentation section of the PHP license page along the lines of "All example code in the PHP manual, including user notes, are additionally available under the terms of the New BSD License," and then link to a local copy of the New (i.e. the 3-clause) BSD License. I'm sure that people will re-use code from the manual with or without an explicit license to it, but it makes a lot of sense to formalize the whole thing, keeping our codebases and licenses all nice and tidy. Cheers, --R
